Printing images on wood or wooden substrates (known in the art as a “wood prints”) cannot presently be accomplished without significant equipment and expense. The equipment required includes expensive ultraviolet (UV) printing equipment to print directly on the wood, or heat press equipment for the pressing and transfer of images on paper to the wooden substrate through a sublimation printing process. The current process and machinery are neither cost-effective nor efficient because the require significant floor space, operator training and maintenance, making it undesirable to retail image and photo processing installations to produce high-quality wood prints for their customers, despite the high demand for these products.
There is a specific demand among these customers for high-quality wood prints that can be prepared from an image file provided to retail image and photo processing installations on site, for example, on a universal serial bus (USB) drive or other computer-readable memory device that can be accessed by in-store computer processors for editing and production of tangible image displays such as photographs and copies. Many customers enjoy the aesthetic of the wood grain as visual or textural background to their images of choice, an aesthetic that cannot be achieved through printing on non-wooden substrates. The present invention provides a method for producing high-quality wood prints on wooden materials of multiple sizes and dimensions using existing ink jet or laser jet printing equipment, for example, without the investment in equipment and training associated with the existing methods of creating these wood prints using UV or sublimation printing technologies.